Right. I took this to mean my personal computer. I used to use a tape drive at home but nowadays it's cheaper and faster to use an external USB attached hard drive.

However I'm also responsible for the backups at work and we absolutely still use tape (LTO4). All of our backups are cloned and one copy is sent offsite daily to be returned 5 weeks later. Also we have monthly archival backups with a copy sent offsite for 10 years. Tape still makes sense for those kind of backups. We're looking at getting a

At work, our primary fileserver has an offsite (80 miles) mirror, with snapshots up to a month back. I'm working on getting something similar working at home with freenas (I work at an ISP, so the offsite isn't a problem for the home setup). Currently I'm doing a nightly rsync of my server to a readynas. My desktop is raid-1, but any data I care about, I try to make sure is on the server and don't further backup the desktop.

You obviously are not a system administrator of any sort. Dedicated backup appliances can be got from any number of vendors including EMC, Exagrid, IBM, Symantec, Quantum and others. They consist of a number of RAID [wikipedia.org] drives with built in data deduplication. Often they are set up as a virtual tape library.

Tape is too old, too slow. Took days to backup a server, so by the time the thing started, the thing ended, data had already changed enough that the backup wasn't any good. Spanning Delta's across multiple tape partitions isn't for the faint of heart either. TAPE is archival, and that is about it. AND if you're doing that, you might as well go 100 Year DVDs and duplicate those (reduncancy of archives)

If you're using tape, it is bacause your time isn't worth anything or you don't have that much data. You're

I ask that, because most people who are running tape for backups, have NEVER even tried to restore a whole server off tape. I have, and it was disasterous because we didn't have a exact copy of the hardware, and couldn't find it. Best we could do is recover data, and not all of it. At that point, you might as well have the data saved to disk, as it is faster searching and copying random data than tape could ever hope for, especially "incremental" backups where the main chan

I ask that, because most people who are running tape for backups, have NEVER even tried to restore a whole server off tape.

Rule number one. If the data is important to you, back it up. If it's important enough to backup, it's important enough to run periodic restore tests - which will expose issues like this. Any well designed backup software package will have features that make sure data is kept in a form that is reasonably quick and easy to restore.

Speaking with my professional hat on (I do backup and recovery for a living), well over 90% of the restores I've been asked to do have been for single files that were accidentally deleted

For this use-case, periodic snapshots of the volume in question work well. A simple cron job will let you rotate ZFS snapshots and clean up old ones so you can have hourly ones for a day, daily ones for a week, weekly ones for 3 months, and monthly ones for a year (or whatever) and can restore accidentally deleted files without having to go to any external media. Backups on external media are for when something very bad happens to your system.

My option isn't on the list either. I have a SSH account with 1TB at two of my friend's homes and I back up everything through rsync every night. Likewise, they both have an SSH account at my home with 1TB dedicated each.

My option isn't on the list either. I have a SSH account with 1TB at two of my friend's homes and I back up everything through rsync every night. Likewise, they both have an SSH account at my home with 1TB dedicated each.

Works like a charm.

This is the way to go. I personally use Crashplan, and back up the critical irreplacable information among my 3 computers (which only totals about 200GB). Then I also have a couple Crashplan "friends", backup to those is free and automatic. Finally when Crashplan offered a year worth of unlimited cloud backups for about $5 on Black Friday, I took the deal and do that too. I don't know if I will renew though. Their cloud backups service is very slow- less than 100kB/sec usually, when I routinely get my

My option isn't on the list either. I have a SSH account with 1TB at two of my friend's homes and I back up everything through rsync every night. Likewise, they both have an SSH account at my home with 1TB dedicated each.

Works like a charm.

I do this, except one of the friend's is my mum (and it's my computer in her garage) and the other is my laptop (no fire or theft resilience, but still good for disc corruption).

The --link-dest option is excellent, as it means I have a series of complete backups instantly available. I keep the union of: the last 10 backups, backups from the last 14 days, backups taken on a date ending in 5 and delete the rest.

A "friend", as they're called, is best described to the likes of you as someone with a very high mutual trust rating

Dude,
You are confusing trusting your friends honesty, with trusting their technical competence.

I absolutely trust friends not to route though personal data. (Hell, user privacy is the golden rule of old-school sysadmins). However, I don't trust them not to have a HD stolen or unpatched box on the net.

For this reason, my offsite backups with friends are always encrypted tarballs.
This is for my friends peace of mind, as well as my own.

if your friends dont hold you in high enough regard to not betray you, maybe you should look in a mirror and evaluate yourself and try to figure why that is. What about you causes them to not value you as a friend? Why are you pickng such poor friends, as such people certainly arent true friends (not a scotsman fallacy) if they would do such things.

I have several friends, many of them fellow/former Marines, whom I would not just trust with my stuff, but with my life and even my daughter's life, I can trust

Still using tape here at home. About 10 years ago I got a deal on a used SUN-branded HP tape changer (12GB native x 6 tapes). Still using it. More than sufficient for the amount of data (e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, a little code) that we create each day. I just have to be careful with any big ISO downloads, DVD copies, etc. so they don't get backed up (I can always download or copy them again).

Something is obsolete only when it can no longer perform it's function; not just because something "bigger, better, faster" has come out.

We traded in our previous vehicle when the "cash for clunkers" program was on in 2009. It was a 1987 Nissan Pathfinder (first year they made the model) with about 200K miles on it. It still got us where we needed to go so it wasn't obsolete.

I can backup all my hard to replace stuff on a single $100 2 TB drive, and I don't have to get involved with swapping physical media. A tape drive which could handle the same amount would cost over $2000, plus a SAS interface, and be slower. I guess if I had to backup over about 60 TB, the $36/3 TB media might make it cheaper, although I'd have to do a lot of tape swapping (or make it 100 TB, and buy an autochanger?).

Neither of the/var/backup directories share disks with the rest of the OS.Unless I lose both machines, I can always restore either of them.

To save space/bandwidth/speed, I use a Tower of Hanoi approach with incremental dumps. With five levels, this gives me 16-31 days of backup always online, and no more than one day's of data lost if a s

For the data that I really care about, I use a USB drive and an online cloud storage service (Dropbox, Skydrive, Google Drive, etc.). I don't really trust either, but both would have to fail on me at the same time for my data to be lost.

For my home machines, I use Time Machine (external hard drive, basically) for all the bulky stuff, and Dropbox for the really mission-critical stuff. My Dropbox syncs to several different machines that I use, including a remotely-located server, just for good measure.

For my main server (which hosts a bunch of web apps for clients, primarily), I use dual hard drives and a combination of tarsnap and plain-ol' S3 for external backup.

Of course, just as important as backing it up - verifying the backups occasio

I have a time machine backup to an external hard-drive, I store important data additionally on a NAS with RAID-5 (the next time I buy a NAS it'll be RAID-6 with high reliability disks [URE rate of at least 10^15]), and I also upload to an online service.

I'm still toying with backing up the NAS to AWS, but I just don't have enough upstream bandwidth to make it comfortable.

I am afraid of the effects of electromagnetic fields on backup devices. A big scanner takes care of data restore.

That's not totally crazy. My MS thesis (among other things) is backed up to 5.25" disks, and those are backed up to 3.5" disks, you know, so it's "future-proofed". Except the future just kept on coming, and I can't lay my hands on a working floppy drive right now. Or a computer with a floppy drive connector on the MB. I assume that at least one word processor I have access to can import WordPerfect 5.1 documents, but I've never tried it. These probably aren't insurmountable obstacles, but the only immediat

I am afraid of the effects of electromagnetic fields on backup devices. A big scanner takes care of data restore.

That's not totally crazy. My MS thesis (among other things) is backed up to 5.25" disks, and those are backed up to 3.5" disks, you know, so it's "future-proofed". Except the future just kept on coming, and I can't lay my hands on a working floppy drive right now.

Been there - I had a PC with a working 5.25" drive in it until just a few years ago - admittedly I never plugged it in. My wife finally nagged me sufficiently and I tossed it out (after letting out some of my frustration on the hard drive with a hammer, just in case...). I still have some floppies - I'm waiting for my grandchilden's 'show and tell' in the 2030s. I'll take along my slide rule too.

I keep a working 486 with both 5.25" drive and older 3.1 floppy drives as well as an old 2x CD burner and Dos 6.22. I boot it up once a year to make sure everything still works. It hasn't happened too often, but in the past two years I've had two clients were it's saved their ass.

One was a small company that was still running their entire database off an old 386 box. Eventually it got to the point where their tape drive failed and it was time to move to a new system before they could sell their company a

50 gigabytes for a rewritable BD-RE, and the media is actually durable. Drop your external HDD from the desk, and it's probably toast. Optical discs you can basically throw around and they are still readable. Only problem is that long exposure to UV radiation might do harm, but I'm not going to leave them lying into the sun anyway.

I have all my data on about 5 BD-REs (most of them photos, some videos, and full e-mail archive. Operating system configs and the like are just a drop in a bucket).

50 gigabytes for a rewritable BD-RE, and the media is actually durable. . . . Optical discs you can basically throw around and they are still readable.

Maybe you're not throwing them hard enough.

But seriously, as to longevity, have you seen any good studies? I'm serious. I did a brief Google search, and the only scientific results I found were in a French study from 2011 that concluded that BDs were better than DVDs under accelerated aging conditions. Except they didn't know just how accelerated the conditions were, just that they used 80C at 80% R/H and started seeing meaningful increases in error rate after hundreds of hours.

So do you re-read and burn anew your BDs a few times a year, or annually, or some other method? What's your strategy and experience?

I have two sets of discs, one offsite (stashed in a cabinet at my workplace), one local. I do incremental increases on the local, and occasionally (twice a year or so) swap the sets, and when this happens I do a full backup on the new local set. Upon writing, I do and instant verification on whether it's readable. I don't care if discs fail years from now, as long as the data l

My PCs are fully backed up to my WHS every night. The WHS itself backs up nightly to a USB drive. The WHS backup, most of the WHS data, and PC backups are synced to another USB drive that lives in my office and comes home about once every two weeks.

The WHS data is backed up online to CrashPlan, except my movies, which are backed up to another external drive that lives at a friend's house.

I also have a bunch of stuff, mostly documents and notes, in Dropbox which is backed up online, to 4 different PCs, and i

What would I choose between Online Service 1 and Online Service 2? Hmm... I wonder...Apart from that obvious poll flaw, multiple methods. 2nd Internal HDD mirrored to two External HDDs for all my data that matters, and Online Service for some documents I absolutely don't want to lose and would like to access from different locations.

I'm going to have to go with "Online Service" simply because I don't really have any critical data that I store on my personal computer.

I've got webmail. I use Google Docs because I don't have to worry about paying the Microsoft tax, and because it's really easy to collaborate with it. I've got a dropbox, because I work on other files in many different places.

Just about the only real data that I store on my home computer is the media files that I torrent. And truthfully, if I need to replace those again,

The original version worked by accessing the gmail user interface using the libgmail library. This library was abandoned as it broke every time google changed its website. It looks like the IMAP fork of the gmailfs still works (http://sr71.net/projects/gmailfs/ [sr71.net]).
With google drive and many other online storage options it seems like it is a waste of time.

I have both a souped-up desktop at home, and a laptop I take with me most places. Anything important is stored on both hard drives. Anything really really important is already on someone else's system. Yes, it's conceivable that I'll lose something if my entire town is destroyed by a tornado or something, but under those conditions my lost data is the least of my concerns.

Yes, it's conceivable that I'll lose something if my entire town is destroyed by a tornado or something, but under those conditions my lost data is the least of my concerns.

Maybe in the short term, but you might be a bit annoyed a year or a decade later.

One of my dad's relatives had some kind of old video camera, from the 1950s, and it's a shame their house burned down and I can't see the films. It's not that big a deal, but it's the only thing in that house I would care to have now.

My backup of everything is in the room adjacent to the host system, simply because my internet connection couldn't handle the load otherwise, but my backup of what's important (~60GB) is 200km awa

I am a freelance software developer, and photography is a hobby of mine (wouldn't dare to call myself a photographer:). I have a few computers in the home office/household that need to be backed up, and about a 1TB of pictures (JPG and RAW).

After years of (occasionally) backing up my data to a variety of external USB drives I bought a Synology DiskStation DS412+ [synology.com] about three months ago, and I couldn't be happier. It holds 4 disks in a RAID (hot-swappable), offers Time Machine backup for the Macs, NFS for th

Surprised NAS isn't an option on the list actually - surely this is quite common among Slashdotters. Or do drives in a NAS still count as 'internal hard drive'?

Anyway yeah, my computers do a regular rsync to over the home network to the NAS. The NAS has drives in RAID 1 (yes, RAID isn't backup, I know that, but in this case the RAID array as a whole is backing up the computers).

Additionally, every now and again, I pull a drive on the NAS and take it to my parents' place on the other

My server backs up on to the desktop. Currently the desktop backs up an internal drive. Once I upgrade the server (stalled, in part due to HD prices), I will backup the desktop on the server: a mutual backup exchange. When that day comes, I may also do a backup exchange with a friend's server located in another state.

I have two identical external HDDs. One of them is always inserted in my workstation. The workstation backs itself up to this disk nightly. On occasion, I will swap the current external drive with its twin, and take the removed one to storage at another location.
Also, the nightly backup is also done across my LAN to a Samba file server. So there are three copies of my data at my house and one copy off site. I do not keep the off site copy as fresh as I probably should.
Also, I try not to backup stuff tha

I *love* these things! Mundane unimportant crap gets backed up on second hard drives, but the huge many-year projects go on MO disks that I periodically swap out for the ones in a safe-deposit box at the bank. $25/year is a really sweet deal to have it not matter if my house burns down.

I know I may be a bit over the top, but I have teamed up with a friend and with my brother to have a trans-national backup system with servers in three locations in two countries.

I back up to my friend's server abroad via rsync. This server (which is also my main mail server) backs up to my brother's server (the backup mail server) with a Time Machine-like perl script so I have generations of backup available on my brother's system. (It is a deliberate choice not to have generations of data available on m

Stuff I care about on D:\ backs up to E:\. E:\ is used only for this purpose.I am in the process of evaluating cloud photo\video sharing sites to have an "offsite" solution for media of that type.For music, tv, and movies, I use iTunes. I download all to D:\, and know that, unless Apple goes belly up, I can download all of them again with minimal fuss.

I back my data up to a flash drive that's been reformatted with ext4. That way my backup program can use links to represent files that haven't changed and save space. Currently, I have about 17.3 GB data and 14.5 GB free space on a 16 GB drive.

Well, I voted for "internal hard drive" but it hardly describes my mdadm raid6 setup with 5*2TB drives stacked in the basement and configured with rsnapshot to backup all my family's PCs twice per day.

Some things are just cache to the Internet - > no back-up. Other things I could get back with effort -> double internal drives, it's not a perfect solution but hey... if the house burns down or my place is cleaned out I have other problems too, you know? The really important stuff -> offsite, but in all honesty most of that is also backed up in my memories. You could say they're irreplaceable but if someone offered a fat enough check for me to walk away from my entire life, all photos and trinkets

I have a remote VPS in a data center somewhere in New Jersey (Linode rules), and I keep a copy there of anything worthwhile. I let them back the whole system up regularly for me, assuming that they know what they're doing and won't lose my data. So far so good.

About monthly I back it up to a hard drive which lives in a firesafe in the house. After the backup I swap the hard drive with an identical drive which I keep in the trunk of my car. The car drive goes gets the full back up and goes into the fire safe.

The car is about as offsite as I can afford.

So:* One online backup on my home server* One offline backup in a fire safe* One offline backup in my car

Personal PCs at home are backed up to an extrnal drive.At work I backup to a hard drive (backup server) which is then replicated to another server. The backups are also copied to tape for external storage provider (mainly for monthly and yearly backups)I suspect, in the future we will dispense with the tape backups unless we're really required to keep information indefinitely!

On a side note, but still on topic, my brother's got an iMac and a Time Capsule. He had to change the hard drive a couple of months a

I'm fucking broke. I just put all my important data on my external hard drive usually, and rarely access those drives (though it is always mounted for easy access). It is primarily for storage. I can't just go out and buy a 500GB or 2TB drive for every type of file I have... it costs too much, internal drives can be a PITA (and "too many" are just not possible), and external drives can be unreliable (requiring ripping it out of its enclosure and converting it to an internal drive, like I had to do with o

The bulk of my data is stored on redundant, external hard drives. Actually they're normally internal drives but I have the USB to HDD adapter...so they're as good as. Also I have a Media Center/Fileserver PC that has the third copy of all the important data. One of the drives is in a safe deposit box at the bank.

But while the data is on a couple of drives, I also have some of the data I'm actively using on several other sources.

Music for example is stored on the two drives but at the same time they're on my